31 October 2009

The bureaucratic tangle involves two city ordinances. The first requires businesses to obtain a license to sell parking spots. But when several of these smaller, family-run businesses headed over to City Hall to apply, they were told they don't qualify.

That's because a long-term neighborhood plan, approved two years ago by the Minneapolis City Council, established something called a Transit Station Area Pedestrian Oriented Overlay District. (George Orwell, call your office!) The idea was to get cars and parking lots out of the area to make way for more bicycles, walkers and light rail in 2014.

Take the case of Tech Huy Ung, whose family has owned the popular U Garden Chinese restaurant for nearly 17 years on University Avenue.

At the first game, he braced for an onslaught of customers. None showed up, fearing traffic snarls. So, for the second game Sept. 19, he charged $25 to let customers park and receive a gift certificate for a free meal any time. City licensing inspectors photographed him waving cars into his 60 spaces and issued two warnings.

Ung says his property taxes have gone up $6,000 to nearly $42,000 a year since the stadium went up, but now he has no customers on game days and no ability to make parking revenue, while he must pay employees to manage the lot so no tailgaters sneak in and violate another ordinance for which he can be fined. "They treat me like a criminal on my own property," Ung said. "It seems like they have too much control."

Make no mistake - if it happens with the U on the horizon, the U will control all aspectsBetween the oligarchs at the University of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis who will do all their bidding, the glow of that new, outdoor, on-campus stadium will dim much faster than it would otherwise.

Read it all. It just gets worse. What a diseased political and civic culture they have over there.

"I was taken down to the office, and they told me that a student told them that I was carrying a knife," Whalen said. He said he told them "they could search me and everything, and they said, 'There's no need for that.'"

"And they said, 'Do you own a knife?' I said, 'Yes, I'm a soldier and an Eagle Scout — I own a knife.' "And they were like, 'Well, is it in your car or anything?' And I told them, 'Yeah, it's in my car right now.'

"And they asked me to show it to them. I didn't realize it was going to be a problem. I knew it wasn't illegal — my police chief grandfather gave the knife to me."

Whalen said he took school administrators to his car because he thought their fears would be allayed when they saw it was just a 2-inch knife. "They thought I had a dagger in my car or something like that, so I thought yeah, I'd show it to them," Whalen said. "I showed it to them, and they told me I had a knife on school property and had to be suspended."

But things didn't end there, Whalen said.

"They brought a cop in, who told them 'he's not breaking any laws, so I can't charge him with anything.'" Whalen said he asked Macri why a 2-inch pocketknife would be considered more dangerous than other everyday items around the school. "I said to him, 'What about a person who has a bat, on a baseball team? That could be a weapon.' And he said, 'Well, it's not the same thing.'"

"They gave me the five-day suspension, because that is all a principal can suspend a student for," he said. "And from there, they had a superintendent hearing to see if the superintendent wanted to suspend me for longer.

"They asked me if I wanted to say anything, and I told them all my accomplishments and what I've done, and the principal even admitted that I had no intent to use the knife, that I had no accessibility to the knife."

But school officials decided to suspend Whalen for an extra 15 days anyway, he said. And unless the decision is changed, he will not be allowed on school grounds until Oct. 21.

"I've been told by someone who works for the district that they had to do it, because if someone else had a knife and they saw that I didn't get a suspension, that it would look bad for the school."

"Zero Tolerance" continues to be code for "Administrator Too Lazy/Stupid to do the Job They Were Hired for." The public sector is just rife with cowards, frauds and idiots.

29 October 2009

In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.

The culture still believes the U.S. has a hipster for president. But the Obama health-care bill, and maybe this whole administration, is starting to look totally out of sync with the new zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington's Forever Land. But it's more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.

It's easy to make jokes about how insubstantial the millions of people seem to be who are constantly using technologies like Twitter. But these new digital and Web-based technologies, which have decentralized virtually everything, now occupy most of the average person's waking hours at work or at home. Mass media is struggling to stay massive in a world whose people want to break up into many discrete markets.

So long as the Democratic Party is the party of the Old Hat People, dependent on public-sector unions with Orwellian names like the Service Employees International Union, it will remain yoked to a pre-iPhone political model that will increasingly strike average everyday American voters as weird and alien to their world.

Today the House pooped out a 1,990 page bill full of WHO KNOWS WHAT. Tell me how that's modern, forward or (HA!) progressive.

24 October 2009

A pair of New Zealand researchers claim a medium-sized dog has about the same carbon footprint as a sport-utility vehicle due to its diet.

Robert and Brenda Vale said in their new book, "Time To Eat The Dog: The Real Guide To Sustainable Living," that a medium-sized dog eats about 362 pounds of meat and 209 pounds of cereal each year, with 43 square miles of land needed to create just 2.2 pounds of dog food cereal, Sky News reported Friday.

The Vales calculate the carbon footprint of a medium-sized dog as 2.08 acres, more than twice the 1.01 acres needed to create enough energy to build a Toyota Land Cruiser. However, the pair said the average driver travels about 12,000 miles a year, making the carbon footprint of the Toyota and the dog roughly equivalent.

However, some experts cast doubt on the book's claims.

"Everything has an impact on the environment but I'm surprised by the size of these numbers. Without analyzing them further I find it difficult to believe," said John Buckey, managing director of carbonfootprint.com.

So today, for the first and maybe last time, I agree with someone from Carbonfootprint.cmo

21 October 2009

The natives (if you go along with the boilerplate that he's from Chicago) are restless:

You'd think it's October 2008, the final month in the Obama presidential candidacy, rather than October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency. Yet the Obama White House is in full campaign mode -- maybe because it needs to mask the shortcomings of the Obama presidency.

Take, for example, all the talk of inheriting the worst economy since the 1930s crisis. That came in response to the news that the federal deficit hit $1.4 trillion.

Yet just a few months ago, the Obama camp was singing a little different tune. It was under criticism for the $787 billion stimulus package it bulldozed through Congress on grounds that massive spending was needed to keep the unemployment rate from breaching 8 percent. When joblessness hit 9.5 percent in June, Vice President Joe Biden said, "We misread how bad the economy was."

They inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, or the economy turned out to be worse than they thought. Which is it? It can't be both -- unless your brain is completely addled by the Obama charisma.

Times are tough. People are out of work. Retirement accounts have crashed. Retail sales are stagnant. Credit is tight, and you can't even sell an excellent new car unless the federal government rides in with an ill-conceived pay-off.

But the cost of a college education continues to go up at a rate higher than inflation for, what, the 25th year in row? So much for the laws of economics.

With the economy struggling, parents and students dared to hope this year might offer a break from rising college costs. Instead, they got another sharp increase.

Average tuition at four-year public colleges in the U.S. climbed 6.5 percent, or $429, to $7,020 this fall as schools apologetically passed on much of their own financial problems, according to an annual report from the College Board, released Tuesday. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent, or $1,096, to $26,273.

"Every sector of the American economy is under stress, and higher education is no exception," said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. "It's regrettable, and it's yet another piece of disappointing economic news that affects families."

See, that's where you're fatally wrong, uh, Terry. In every other part of the economy, anything you'd want to buy is more affordable than ever. Anyone providing goods or services has dropped prices and sweetened offers in order to drive business . . . except Big Education.

Across the nation, the price increases came despite painful cost-cutting by colleges on everything from faculty to cafeterias and sports travel. And as usual, the rise in tuition outstripped the overall inflation rate.

In fact, during the period covered by the report, consumer prices declined 2.1 percent. So the latest tuition increase at public colleges was closer to 9 percent in real terms. "It's only natural for parents to question why colleges are raising their prices yet again, while the rest of our economy is inflation-free," said James Boyle, president of the group College Parents of America.

The only reason tuition can keep going up is because government keeps pumping money into Big Education. The only reason money keeps getting pumped into Big Education is because terrified politicians will never turn off the spigot and let the system settle to a sustainable equilibrium.

KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department's ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want.

"The Voting Rights Act is supposed to protect against situations when black voters are locked out because of racism," said Abigail Thernstrom, a Republican appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "There is no entitlement to elect a candidate they prefer on the assumption that all black voters prefer Democratic candidates."

Whites typically cast the majority of votes in Kinston's general elections. Kinston residents contributed to Barack Obama's victory as America's first black president and voted by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 to eliminate partisan elections in the city.

In a letter dated Aug. 17, the city received the Justice Department's answer: Elections must remain partisan because the change's "effect will be strictly racial."

"Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office," Loretta King, who at the time was the acting head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the city.

Ms. King wrote that voters in Kinston vote more along racial than party lines and without the potential for voting a straight Democratic ticket, "the limited remaining support from white voters for a black Democratic candidate will diminish even more."

Ms. King is the same official who put a stop to the New Black Panther Party case. In that case, the Justice Department filed a civil complaint in Philadelphia after two members of the black revolutionary group dressed in quasi-military garb stood outside a polling place on election last year and purportedly intimidated voters with racial insults, slurs and a nightstick.

By crapping your pants over AGs that served under Bush and letting this Holder creep slide by, you expose yourself as shallow and blinded by the growing-dimmer Obama light.

12 October 2009

08 October 2009

(Dalia) Mogahed, appointed to the President's Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was "oversimplified" and the majority of women around the world associate it with "gender justice".

Oh really? Do tell.

The White House adviser made the remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party.

I'll bet that was Must-See TV

The group believes in the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world.

Go on (I mean, I'm sure you have a hell of a definition of 'non-violent destruction' which I'm dying to hear.

During the 45-minute discussion, on the Islam Channel programme Muslimah Dilemma earlier this week, the two members of the group made repeated attacks on secular "man-made law" and the West's "lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism". They called for Sharia Law to be "the source of legislation" and said that women should not be "permitted to hold a position of leadership in government".

Sounds like a fun, modern, evolved bunch.

Miss Mogahed made no challenge to these demands and said that "promiscuity" and the "breakdown of traditional values" were what Muslims admired least about the West. She said: "I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media.

Miss Mogahed, who was born in Egypt and moved to America at the age of five, is the first veiled Muslim woman to serve in the White House. Her appointment was seen as a sign of the Obama administration's determination to reach out to the Muslim world.

New Jersey enacted its half millionaire millionaires' tax in 2004. Pitched by the state's unions as the cure for Jersey's budget woes, the state collected $9.5 billion in personal income taxes in fiscal 2005. Last year, four budget cycles later, the state collected only $10.3 billion and this year it's estimating just $9.4 billion from the same tax. Revenues have fallen so far below projections that Jersey has actually had to cut its spending (not just its rate of spending, like most states) by more than $3 billion this year despite $2 billion in federal stimulus aid for the state budget. And even so, Jersey had to skip payments to its pension system. If it were a business Jersey would be insolvent, a remarkable achievement in a place whose residents boast the highest personal income in the nation.

Maryland enacted its millionaires' tax in the fall of 2007. Earlier this year the state scrambled to enact mid-year budget cuts because of a sharp shortfall in revenues. Year-to-date personal income tax collections are off by about $650 million, and the Maryland comptroller has said, "It seems reasonable to assume...that there will be a significant decline in the number of returns with taxable income over $1 million and a substantial decline in the income reported on those returns."

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The really bad news, however, is that there is no easy way out of this for many of these states. Their budget problems are structural and long-term and can't be fixed merely by trimming a little waste and pork here and there. Most of these states have wracked up huge debts, for instance, so that bond payments are now weighing down their balance sheets. Their bondholders must be fed or chaos will ensue.

These states also suffer from huge public employee pension and benefits obligations that are often guaranteed by law. In fact, the pension funds of these states are so underfunded they make the Social Security Trust Fund look solvent by comparison.

For decades, failed governance on both the state and federal level have written checks to their political patronage that they can no longer cash. Like a bounced check, it's time to also bounce the flunky constituents, from dog catcher on up.

06 October 2009

04 October 2009

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's failed bid to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago cost more than a bruised ego.

Taxpayers shelled out probably $1 million or more for the president, his wife and others to fly to Copenhagen and back to woo members of the International Olympic Committee.

A 2006 congressional study pegged the cost of flying Air Force One at $56,518 an hour. The Pentagon recently said it cost $100,219 an hour to fly the huge, reconfigured Boeing 747 without Obama aboard. The Pentagon estimate included more costs for support needs, such as maintenance.

At those rates, the president's 14-hour trip to Copenhagen and back (air travel cost alone) cost about $790,000 to $1.4 million.

Every time the public contributes to a sports stadium, a freeway, launching the space shuttle, etc, all I hear are the bed-wetters cry about starving families, rundown schools or empty food shelves. Well, predictable sheep, where are you on the matter of O's failed voyage to Denmark?

Now, the decision that was made to add troops in the spring has not even been fully implemented yet. You know, you don't get up and just deploy the 82nd Airborne, and they get there the next day.

Actually, Madame Secretary of State, yes they do. With six hours to spare, in fact:

Army Brig. Gen. William Mayville shared his concerns as the division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team trains to re-assume its role in June as the U.S. global response force. In this capacity, the brigade will be on 24/7 standby, ready to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours.

Snap Shots

Who's This 'OctaneBoy?'

I know the time. I get it. I'm tightly wound, but know when to kick off the shoes. I pay attention. I observe everything. I know what I'm doing and know how it works. I crave the authentic, the genuine and the classic, and the noise, jive and bullshit of this era will find no purchase on my watch.
And I can flat drive anything.